It’s hard not to get bored of always repeating the same thing. Practically since the start of the year (and we’ll just stick to 2012 for now...) not a single media briefing has passed without Stefano Domenicali being asked about the racing future of Felipe Massa. Today’s appointment in the FIA press conference couldn’t be any exception. The Scuderia’s Team Principal has sometimes tried to be rather ‘creative’ in his answers but he is running out of new ideas and so he tried to wriggle out of it, albeit with a certain elegance: “I don’t think that it is important or interesting whether or not I know who will be alongside Fernando in 2013. Very soon we will tell you the reality of the situation but until there is some news I will keep quiet, partly because I am starting to get very bored of giving the same answers to the same questions...” Another argument that has raised a bit of interest has been the wind tunnel at Maranello. “Our facility is certainly not the best one: it’s now obsolete,” explained Domenicali. “We are trying to improve the quality of the instruments that we have, among them the correlation between the data from the tunnel and the track: this is our plan for next season.”
The manager from Imola continued: “We are also using other facilities and in a couple of weeks we will come up with a more specific plan to decide on the right time to close our tunnel and improve the parts of it that aren’t at the highest level. I’m sure that other teams have had similar problems but it’s true that in the second part of the season not all the developments that we have brought to the track have worked. So we have begun to investigate and we have located the problem, which mainly comes from the instruments that aren’t at the very highest level compared to what is currently on the market. We want to improve that so we can raise the percentage of new parts that give positive results.”
Domenicali was honest in his evaluations of the impact of the problem on the fight for the world championship: “I think the situation is very clear: if you aren’t capable of improving the car then it’s more difficult to fight, also because we can’t always rely on others having problems. We can’t always make do with a third or a fourth place, we must make sure that we can win a race, then we’ll see how the classification looks.”
Finally there was no escaping a question on the recent, second and definitive retirement of Michael Schumacher: “I think Michael has shown he is still a very, very quick driver. He is a seven-time world champion and he is still one of the best around. As a friend of his, I am very happy with the decision he has taken because I think he has made this choice based on his experience and, everything considered, I believe it is the best possible decision. All of us, not only myself but in the name of the entire Ferrari family – wish him all the best for his future. He is still very young, so he certainly has the chance to do lots of things!”